The Philosophers' Cocoon

A guest post by Ian James Kidd, University of Nottingham

 Some years ago, a then-colleague would occasionally spot me sitting working in a coffee shop and join me to chat. Sometimes, he would ask about whichever paper I was writing, and often offer to take a look. After reading the first couple of paragraphs, my colleague would purse his lips, shake his head, and say, “No, you haven’t quite got it yet.”

What I hadn’t ‘got’ was the skill of crafting a good paper – a skill not only possessed but had fully mastered by my well-published colleague. Almost every paper he wrote soon appeared in the ‘top’ journals, so similarly mastering that skill would’ve supercharged my chances of securing a postdoc or a permanent job. Unfortunately, not once did my then-colleague offer any advice on the skill of crafting a paper, leaving me without a crucial skill – that of translating one’s philosophical ideas into the form of a publishable journal article.

I offer this recollection to illustrate what seems to be a crucial distinction between being good at philosophy and being good at academic philosophy. Sitting in that coffee shop, what I lacked wasn’t the ability to come up with good and useful philosophical ideas (one thing my then-colleague did, at the least, affirm). I lacked the specific performative academic competence needed to successfully understand and exploit the norms and structures of academic philosophy. Without that specific competence, my philosophical abilities were not able to do any professional work for me.

Clearly, there are many super philosophers out there, who can think widely, deeply, and clearly about aspects of existence and our place within it. The problem is that many of them may be good at philosophy but are not always good at academic philosophy – while they have a love of wisdom or craving to understand, what they lack are the practical and professional abilities to enact their philosophising within the accepted forms and norms of academia. Crucially, I don’t say this as a criticism of those philosophers – quite the opposite! My concern is that many good philosophers aren’t being helped consistently to also become good academic philosophers. Before speculating on what one can do about this, let me fill out the distinction a little.

Saying what makes a good philosopher is complex and always arouses disagreement, not least since the characteristics of a good philosopher depend a lot on what one considers to be the aims of philosophising, and those are highly plural. The ancient Indian philosophies regarded metaphysical theorising as crucial to the ‘liberation’ of humans from the ‘wheel of suffering’, a conviction largely rejected by classical Chinese philosophers, for whom abstract theory was a distraction from the spontaneity characteristic of a properly ‘harmonious’ life, something apt to be threatened by self-indulgent ‘cleverness’.

Within modern academic philosophy, one finds many different conceptions of the aims of philosophy, ranging from the modest to the momentous. Common candidates may include advancing social justice, enhancing scientific enquiry, informing public policy, or the solution of local intellectual problems or, at the other end, the development of ‘big picture’ accounts of life, the universe, and everything.

Across these aims, though, one can discern a stable set of attitudes, virtues, and dispositions constitutive of a good philosopher, even if there is disagreement about their definition and relative priority – intellectual curiosity, fair-mindedness, broad-mindedness, critical tenacity, insightfulness … to name just a few. Most of us would at least mention these traits, not least when asked to list the ‘transferable skills’ afforded by a BA in Philosophy.

Being good at philosophy is, partly, a matter of having these sorts of traits, since they enable us to better perform the activities constitutive of philosophising. They help us to see clearly, argue robustly, debate productively, explain lucidly, and reason compellingly as both solitary thinkers and collaborative enquirers. But these traits don’t necessarily make one good at academic philosophy – something that requires a different set of attitudes and competences.

A person can be good at this thing called philosophy without also being good at this thing called academic philosophy, which is one historically recent, institutionalised form taken by philosophy. Think of how differently philosophy is conceived and practiced in a medieval Christian monastery, a Zen Buddhist temple, or a 21^st century British university. Being good at academic philosophy means being confident and competent at being able to understand and productively exploit the current professional and institutional norms and arrangements that currently structure most contemporary philosophising. It requires a set of knowledge, skills, and virtues that are messily interwoven with complex systems of social power and gendered, racialised, and class privilege.

Consider some of the things constitutive of being good at academic philosophy:

• Being good at delivering ‘elevator pitches’, those crisp, concise statements of one’s project and its intellectual and scholarly relevance.
• Being good at crafting articles for the putatively ‘top’ journals.
• Being good at writing successful funding and grant applications.
• Being good at identifying and playing into ‘hot topics’, emerging trends, and other disciplinary tendencies that tend to bring attention and money in their wake.
• Being good at giving eloquent, engaging, charismatic talks.
• Being good at presenting oneself as a highly professional, competent, effortlessly capable prospective hire.
• Being good at playing the games of institutional and professional politics to secure for oneself various advantages and resources.
• Being good at dealing with academic presses, media offices, faculty research bosses, and others with power or influence over the material and professional goods of academia.
• Being good at social networking – at striking up conversations, forming contacts, and using who and what one knows to leverage certain advantages (eg to acquire ‘insider knowledge’ about upcoming jobs, grants, and projects).

Three comments on these examples. First, the virtues that make one a good philosopher do not always apply automatically (or at all) to these activities: an imaginative critic or theorist is not always similarly imaginative when it comes to developing projects that play into newly emerging ‘research priorities’.

Second, success in being good at philosophy often requires a very different set of epistemic, practical, and interpersonal competences, many of which are often classified as vices. ‘Playing the game’, in terms of institutional and disciplinary politics, typically rewards traits such as aggressive ambition, insincerity, and self-interestedness. Not always, for sure, but to play that game is to step into an arena with ever-finer lines between legitimate self-interest, pragmatic acquiescence, and more Machiavellian traits.

A third comment on the traits needed to be good at academic philosophy is that they’re often correlated with social and institutional systems of power and privilege. Think of the performative ability to give really excellent talks – at conferences or before the hiring committee for your dream job – which requires virtues of articulation (lucidity, eloquence, charismatic ‘presence’). Since all of these traits are highly gendered and strongly correlated with socioeconomically privileged groups, our judgements about whether a speaker is manifesting them is well-established to be highly corrupted by implicit biases, stereotypes, and by entrenched, tacit conceptions of what a philosopher looks like.

In an ideal world, all philosophers would be good at philosophy in its general and academic senses. Unfortunately, those two sets of competences don’t always come as a pair. Some are good at philosophy, but unfortunately not so good at academic philosophy – they can’t give talks well, can’t craft journal articles, and so on. Some are alright at philosophy, by whatever standard, but extremely good at ‘academicking’ – able to effortlessly exploit the structures and norms of the discipline to their advantage.

What is the usefulness of the distinction between being good at philosophy and at academic philosophy?

1/ It can offer consolation to those philosophers who infer from a lack of success in getting published, or called to interview, or awarded research grants that they are no good at philosophy. They might be very good at philosophy, maybe even really excellent. But they are not so good at academic philosophy, in the sense of having been afforded means of acquiring that additional set of competences. Of course, what those philosophers want isn’t just the quiet assurance that they’re good at philosophy, as they hoped, since what they’re also wanting is employment. But it’s worth emphasising that many philosophers conceive of their subject in vocational terms, rather than as an incidental dimension of their life, just as many musicians and artists conceive of their music and art as expressive of their deepest sensibilities and aspirations. For these vocationally animated philosophers, their sense that they are actually no good at the activity that goes deep with them, those animated by the ‘love of wisdom’, is a source of profound sadness and remorse. If that sense is a false one, it ought to be repaired, since their distress is liable to be one of existential regret, as well as professional frustration (even if the initial horribleness of being ‘post-academic’ can become the satisfaction of being a ‘free range philosopher’).

2/ A main reason some philosophers are not good academic philosophy is due to inadequate training, whether because what they get is too little, too late, or insufficient in its breadth and sophistication. Naturally, the quality of training varies enormously, depending on one’s supervisors, mentors, department, and institutional resources (many places wish they could offer more training but find this impossible given their budgets and workloads).

Many young philosophers don’t get systematic training in the full range of skills required for professional life – for instance, I was never taught how to plan a lecture, or how to deliver a lecture, or how to write lecture notes, or how to design a reading list. Such professional skills can be acquired through the long process of trial and error, which some insist is best, anyway. But trial and error require time, self-confidence, and a regular supply of funded opportunities (to deliver lectures, for instance) that aren’t available to everyone.

All of this shows the contingency and variability of the sorts of formal and informal training that we all need to become good at academic philosophy. Even though that training is essential for the professional advancement of ourselves and our students, not everyone gets it reliably or regularly or to a sufficiently high standard.

3/ By thinking about the good at philosophy/being good at academic philosophy distinction, we’re better placed to think critically about our profession’s values, norms, and priorities. Whether at the departmental or the disciplinary level, academic philosophy is well-known to have serious problems – of prestige bias and implicit bias, to the invidious journal ranking systems that systematically privilege certain topics, methods, and traditions over others, to entrenched and enduring forms of intellectual xenophobia that marginalise so-called ‘non-Western’ traditions. Substantive inequalities in who gets to enjoy the training and social capital to become good at academic philosophy exacerbate all of these problems.

This means that those who are good at philosophy and have the privilege of also being good at academic philosophy ought to use their power for good. If you’ve been able to master the art of crafting journal articles, then pass it on to the early career philosopher staring glumly at another rejection letter over their cold latte. If you’re able to play politics well, use that to push for a fairer distribution of resources in your community. If you’re good at giving elevator pitches, take time to try and impart that skill to shy graduate students.

This means that those good at being academic philosophy must exercise those difficult virtues which are more ‘other-regarding’—those needed to resist the temptations to help entrench self-advantageous disciplinary norms and structures, to resist the selfish imperative to play along with funding and ranking structures that accelerate one’s own career even as they destroy the morale and working conditions of others … to name but a few.

If you’re good at philosophy and also good at academic philosophy, there’s a good chance you enjoy certain benefits, such as tenure, a strong publication record, a degree of financial stability, and so on. If so, then try to help others to acquire those goods, too. Pay it forward. Share the goods. Build the community. Pull up those below you, rather than look down only with relief, quietly glad you’re no longer one of the struggling masses.

A lot of this work of academic collegiality is invisible and largely unrewarded, as it the case with most caregiving work. The virtues of collegiality like generosity and patience aren’t the most prized within our increasingly competitive, self-interested environment. If you have time to spend, the incentive structures push you to write your own articles, not to devote the time to giving careful, thoughtful comments on other people’s. What’s done anonymously can’t be cashed in for personal credit, hence the recent debate about possible reforms of the journal system.

Underlying these remarks is a deeper worry: that under the current disciplinary and professional conditions, being good at academic philosophy is tending to outweigh being good at philosophy. We are wasting good philosophers by not training them to take their roles as good academic philosophers, since they tend to drift out of our communities, their intended professional homes. Worse still, we become increasingly at risk of overrewarding those who are trend-savvy, self-promotionally forceful, and professionally cunning.

We need to be both good at philosophy and good at academic philosophy. We just need to value them both with a clear, informed sense of their respective roles in the late modern forms of philosophising. It is a good thing if one can do the elevator-pitch, grant-writing, ‘crafting a paper’ things, but only because they allow one to do the really important thing – doing good philosophy. The balance sought is delicate, easily lost in environments crowded with targets, imperatives, and pressures. But achieving such balance is itself a necessary competence that ought to be taught – systematically rather than erratically – to emerging philosophers. We need to be good at what we do, but also good at being good at what we do—and that means also being good to others, too.

 

My thanks to Craig French and Helen de Cruz for very helpful comments and discussion.

 

http://www.ianjameskidd.weebly.com